1. Alan Greenspan turned 100. While Greenspan is best known for being the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he was a member of Ayn Rand’s Collective. In fact, he was one of the four signers to Rand’s To Whom It May Concern, which excommunicated Nathaniel and Barbara Branden in 1968. In his autobiography, Greenspan said that while he started to doubt certain aspects of Objectivism (such as that government could exist without coercive taxation), he remained friends with Rand until she died. Harry Binswanger said he could tell by the mid 1970’s that Greenspan wasn’t a consistent Objectivist. (I recall that he was harsher, but I can’t find the quote.) I’ve wondered why Rand couldn’t see that Greenspan was at least borderline betraying Objectivism.* Rand’s biographers have said she admired Greenspan because, unlike most of her followers, he was older and had an independent career.
2. The big news, of course, is the United States and Israel’s attack on Iran. As long-time readers of this blog know, the Ayn Rand Institute and its writers have considered removing the Islamic regime in Iran essential to ending terrorism in the West. In fact, Leonard Peikoff famously called for a nuclear attack on Iran following the attacks on September 11, 2001. I wondered what the ARI’s response given that the US attack was ordered by President Trump, whom ARI writers have compared to, among other people, Adolf Hitler. Their main opposition is that this military action wasn’t approved by Congress. In addition, ARI foreign policy spokesman Elan Journo doesn’t think Trump’s goal of replacing the current government with a friendlier regime (as hoped for in Venezuela) goes far enough. Journo says the US should install a government whose leaders have no connection to the existing regime.
3. Leonard Peikoff’s post- September 11 piece on ending terrorism hasn’t aged well. Peikoff said the very survival of the United States was at stake if we didn’t go to war with Iran — which to Peikoff meant commencing a ground invasion, occupying the country, and engaging in “the equivalent of de-Nazifying” Iran (which would presumably require the partial or complete suppression of Islam). None of this happened and twenty-five years later, we are still here. I don’t know what Peikoff knew when he published the article on October 2, but we now know that most of the hijackers were of Saudi Arabian origin and none was Iranian. Extremist Islamic terrorism in the West is much more Sunni than Shite (the majority religion in Iran) best I can tell.
4. Speaking of Iran, several Objectivist writers have noticed that interim Iranian leader Ali Larijani wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of math. Speaking of ominous parallels, Pope Leo just praised the oldest living priest, Fr. Bruno Kant, on his 110th birthday.
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*James Valliant said Rand’s mind was an MRI in detecting the problems in Nathaniel Branden’s psycho-epistemology.
---Neil Parille
16 comments:
Journo says the US should install a government whose leaders have no connection to the existing regime.
Easier said than done. Objectivists like to think of themselves as being more "rational" and attached to "reality" than other commentators, but like so many who have dogmatic opinions about this issue, they have no idea of the extent of their ignorance. Regime change is not only incredibly costly and difficult, the United States over the last two decades it's not any good at it. This attack on Iran is likely part of a larger strategy to weaken Russia and China by disarming their proxies around the world, thus reducing the chances that China will attempt to invade Taiwan next year.
I think it's a mistake to assume that there's any "larger strategy" involved. As someone who's been digging into the details over the last couple of years (something I never did when I called myself an Objectivist), there are many people influencing Trump's policy. That helps explain why it seem so capricious and fluid -- it constantly changes depending on who's pulling the strings at any given moment. One of them is almost certainly Putin, so the idea that there's a strategy to "weaken Russia" seems unlikely.
Me again (I've been dropping some comments in the last couple of days, quite randomly.) I should identify myself as Mark C.
That said, I just came across a post by an Objectivist associated with ARI named Stewart Margolis. He's a good guy, I think, from my interactions with him, who I've perceived as in the very beginning of a process of moving away from orthodox Objectivism. He just posted a piece on Substack titled "Would John Galt Retire?" It's worth reading, I think.
https://stewartmargolis.substack.com/p/would-john-galt-retire
I commented on his post with the following:
"Let me see if I can summarize this post… Ayn Rand created a fictional character as the expression of her vision of the “ideal man.” Comparing yourself to this fictional character creates a “nagging voice in the back of your head” that makes you question whether you are being “productive” enough — even though you are happy with what you’re actually doing. You can’t silence that voice, and so you envy your cats who exist in a state of “joy and sensual pleasure” by virtue of their lack of a rational faculty by which they might judge their “lack of productivity” as a flaw. And the standard against which they might judge themselves, if they were capable, is that same fictional character.
In my own intellectual journey, I genuinely find this post quite fascinating and very illuminating."
The ARI calls for nuclear attack on Iran:
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Eliminating the threat from Iran’s Islamic totalitarian regime necessitates discrediting its ideology, making it a lost cause. Some may doubt this is possible, in the shadow of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, and indeed, it has been decades since America has followed the right approach. History, however, provides a compelling model.
Consider the lesson from the 1945 defeat of martyrdom-extolling imperial Japan, which offered an “unconditional surrender” only after two atom bombs. The historian John David Lewis has eloquently described American efforts to discredit and uproot the regime’s ideology from schools and government, and to block from political office former regime leaders.
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https://newideal.aynrand.org/iran-is-not-venezuela/
-NP
Setting aside their weird death cult nuclear weapon fetish, I also found this interesting: "Iran’s 1979 revolution created an Islamist regime led by a clerical “supreme leader.”"
I mean, that's not at all accurate, and it's strange that they (almost all Objectivists, not just ARI) really seem to think Iranian history started in 1979.
The revolution didn't just spontaneously happen for no apparent reason, and then out of it came a random "Islamist regime" that hates America because of "our secular, pro-individual freedom society." The revolution itself was the direct result of America having installed a brutal dictator to replace their democratically elected secular leader in 1953, and then keeping him in power for 25 years. That was the foundation of their hatred for America, and that was the energy that allowed the Islamists to take power. Some chickens just came home to roost.
And then it didn't help that after the revolution, we supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, including providing him with the precursors for the chemical weapons he used against Iranians. We shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988, killing 290 people (including 66 children). Oops!
Then, we gladly accepted Iranian assistance with rooting out Al Qaeda and other Sunni Muslim terrorist groups immediately after 9/11 (which was carried out by Sunnis, not Shias; Iran is Shia Muslim, of course), and then repaid Iran for their help by including them in our "Axis of Evil" along with North Korea and Iraq. The "Death to America" chants picked up again at that point, after having been halted after 9/11.
Then, the Iranians had already agreed to a deal not to build nuclear weapons, and it was working. But Trump killed it because it was an Obama plan and then I'm sure because he wanted the ability to attack Iran at some future point. And I won't even go into the Israeli angle, nor Netanyahu.
I suppose my point is: as with so many things, the Objectivist perspective is incredibly facile and ignorant. They just don't seem to have any interest in learning any of the facts, especially if those facts contradict them.
Consider: they have their "anti-just war theory" doctrine that says the country that defends itself against attack can do whatever is necessary to defend itself. Right or wrong (I think, wrong), that would depend on the defending country being 100% innocent, and then there would have to be some standard for determining what's "necessary."
In fact, I think they just want carte blanche to kill as many civilians as they want, in retribution for any imagined slight -- which they then call "justice." Actually, come to think of it, maybe that explains their death cult nuclear weapons fetish.
The "To whom it may concern" article. Did any of them who signed it have any self-respect?
>Consider the lesson from the 1945 defeat of martyrdom-extolling imperial Japan, which offered an “unconditional surrender” only after two atom bombs
Consider the fact that no one but the US had nukes at the time, so no other country could object to their use because no other country was in a position to respond in any meaningful way. Obviously, today is different from 1945, since lots of countries have nukes, including at least one Islamic one: Pakistan. Using nukes in the current Iran conflict would be foolish, if not downright suicidal.
Consider the fact that even after 2 nukes deployed on Japanese cities (August 6th, Hiroshima; August 9th, Nagasaki) Japan did not surrender until almost a week later on August 15th. One of the main reasons for that decision was not so much the possibility of a 3rd nuke on another Japanese city, but the actual invasion of Japanese-controlled Manchuria by the USSR's Red Army on August 9th (concurrent with the nuking of Nagasaki), which had been agreed upon by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference. The possibility of the Red Army invading the Japanese home islands—as well as the fear of a 3rd atomic bomb from the US—provoked the unconditional surrender the US had long sought. This is obviously very different from the current US/Israeli war in Iran.
There's an interesting convergence between Hegseth's "we negotiate with bombs" and Peter Schwartz in his Substack article "The Goal of Our War Against Iran" where he says we should issue an ultimatum to the Iranian people: "We will bomb you until you choose a government we approve." That's after he says we don't need to send in ground forces (demonstrating an ignorance of military strategy and history that would be funny if the stakes weren't so high), setting aside what Schwartz thinks our goals should be and why the US even has a legitimate right to pursue them.
The question for me: is this convergence random, are they taking their ideas from the same places, or is there a connection between Objectivism and Hegseth, somewhere?
Since this thread seems to be around politics and current events, I thought I'd post something I just posted on Facebook (most of my Facebook friends are Objectivists, going back to when I called myself one):
One reason why it's very hard to debate Objectivists is that they learned from Ayn Rand to equivocate over the meaning of words. At times, their entire arguments are based on them (or Rand) using words according to very different definitions than those by which other people use the same words.
I was recently debating America as a "democracy" versus a "republic," and gave up because the Objectivists were mainly just equivocating around definitions. And they were historically ignorant, another problem with Objectivists.
Relative to that, here's James Madison discussing the difficulties of arriving at definitions for words like "republic":
It is also true, however, that during the eighteenth century the terms “democracy” and “republic” were used rather interchangeably in both common and philosophical usage. Madison, in fact, was well aware of the difficulty of defining “republic.” In Federalist No. 39, he posed the question “What, then, are the distinctive characters (sic) of the republican form?” In response he pointed to the enormous range of meanings given to the word “republic.” “Were an answer to this question to be sought … in the application of the term by political writers, to the constitutions of different states, no satisfactory one could ever be found. Holland, in which no particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people, has passed almost universally under the denomination of a republic. The same title has been bestowed on Venice, where absolute power over the great body of the people is exercised, in the most absolute manner, by a small body of hereditary nobles.”
In view of this ambiguity, Madison proposed that “we may define a republic to be … a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, or for a limited period, or during good behavior.” By defining a republic as a government which derives all its powers “directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” Madison now seems to be contradicting the distinction he had drawn earlier in Federalist No. 10. We might read his struggle with definitions as a further illustration of the prevailing confusion over the two terms.
Dahl, Robert A.. How Democratic Is the American Constitution?: Second Edition (Castle Lecture Series) (p. 158). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Mark C.
Q: Did the words "democracy" and "republic" mean the same thing in the 18th century"
A: "No, in the 18th century, "democracy" and "republic" were not considered synonymous. While both meant governments based on popular sovereignty rather than a monarch, founders (like Madison) defined "pure democracy" as direct rule by citizens, which they feared as unstable. A "republic" meant a representative government designed to curb majority tyranny."
Q: How did James Madison define "democracy"?
A: "James Madison defined "pure democracy" as a system where citizens assemble and administer government in person, which he believed inevitably leads to turbulence, factionalism, and the "tyranny of the majority". He distinguished this from a republic, or representative democracy, which he argued better protects individual rights and filters public views through elected officials."
"From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Madison’s alternative to pure democracy is not some form of authoritarianism, it is instead representative democracy, or republicanism. In the very next paragraph Madison writes,
"A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended."
What Madison is practicing here is called "discernment," not "equivocation." However bereft of historical knowledge many Objectivists may be, that is most likely what they are practicing, too, when insisting on acknowledging fine conceptual distinctions between "democracy" (Madison's "direct democracy" or "pure democracy") and "republic" (Madison's "representative democracy").
praxeology -
First, I didn't say that Madison equivocated, I said that the Objectivists I was debating were equivocating. Second, I quoted from the cited book to point out that Madison wasn't as clear on the distinction between "democracy" and "republic" as some people assert that he was. That's true of the other Founders as well, I think. For clarity, everything after the colon was the quote.
Here's more from the same book (again, following this colon):
In view of this ambiguity, Madison proposed that “we may define a republic to be … a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, or for a limited period, or during good behavior.”3 By defining a republic as a government which derives all its powers “directly or indirectly from the great body of the people,” Madison now seems to be contradicting the distinction he had drawn earlier in Federalist No. 10. We might read his struggle with definitions as a further illustration of the prevailing confusion over the two terms.
If further evidence were needed of the ambiguity of terminology, we could turn to a highly influential writer whose work was well known to Madison and many of his contemporaries. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748) Montesquieu had distinguished three kinds of governments: republican, monarchic, and despotic. Republican governments were of two kinds: “When, in a republic, the people as a body have the sovereign power, it is a Democracy. When the sovereign power is in the hands of a part of the people, it is called an Aristocracy.”4 But Montesquieu also insisted that “It is in the nature of a republic that it has only a small territory: without that it could scarcely exist.”5
From Aristotle to Montesquieu, political philosophers had no place in their classifications for representative democracy. It was simply an unknown species, one yet to evolve. In November 1787, however, only two months after the Philadelphia convention had adjourned, James Wilson had already updated the older classifications:
“The three species of governments … are the monarchical, aristocratical and democratical. In a monarchy, the supreme power is vested in a single person: in an aristocracy … by a body not formed upon the principle of representation, but enjoying their station by descent, or election among themselves, or in right of some personal or territorial qualifications; and lastly, in a democracy, it is inherent in a people, and is exercised by themselves or their representatives [italics added]…. [O]f what description is the Constitution before us? In its principles, Sir, it is purely democratical: varying indeed in its form in order to admit all the advantages, and to exclude all the disadvantages which are incidental to the known and established constitution of government. But when we take an extensive and accurate view of the streams of power that appear through this great and comprehensive plan … we shall be able to trace them to one great and noble source, THE PEOPLE.”6 At the Virginia ratifying convention ome month later, John Marshall, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court, declared that the “Constitution provided for ‘a well regulated democracy’ where no king, or president, could undermine representative government.”7
Dahl, Robert A.. How Democratic Is the American Constitution?: Second Edition (Castle Lecture Series) (p. 158). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Robert A. Dahl, eh? Yet another "progressive," democratic-socialist at an elitist Ivy-league stronghold (Yale University) with lots of ideas unanchored to reality. The beautiful thing about such intellectuals (as pointed out by critics such as Thomas Sowell) is that they suffer no cost (social, monetary, or otherwise) for being wrong. They just continue publishing.
"Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) was a preeminent Yale political scientist and democratic socialist who redefined modern democratic theory. He advocated for "polyarchy" (rule by many), pluralist democracy, and in his later work, "workplace democracy" and economic equality, reflecting a strong progressive vision for deepening political equality.
Key Progressive and Intellectual Contributions:
Democratic Socialist Perspective: Dahl was a socialist who criticized capitalism's influence on democratic processes.
Economic Democracy: He argued for extending democratic principles into the economic sphere, advocating for worker-owned and controlled enterprises, as detailed in A Preface to Economic Democracy.***
Critique of the U.S. Constitution: He questioned the efficacy and fairness of the American constitutional structure in How Democratic is the American Constitution?.
Pluralism and Polyarchy: He challenged elitist theories, arguing that modern democracy functions through competition among diverse groups (pluralism), creating "polyarchy".
Focus on Power Dynamics: His work, notably Who Governs?, focused on understanding how power is distributed and how to make democracy more representative."
(***Homework assignment: cite one example of legislation that coercively PREVENTS or FORBIDS workers from starting a business and owning it themselves. Hint: there are none. Workers are free to start businesses and own them, if they so wish. Problem: most workers do NOT wish to start businesses and own them because ownership of a business (as most business owners and entrepreneurs will acknowledge) is a pain in the arse. The majority of workers simply want to be hit with a paycheck at regular intervals so they can get on with the rest of their lives. Acknowledging this fact is known as "common sense," something apparently lacking in the bemused writings of political science professors at Yale.
My point being, primarily, that in saying America "is a republic, not a democracy!" many Objectivists (including the ones I was debating) mean that _the sovereign power does not vest in the people_ but rather somewhere else. They equate the sovereign power being vested in the people as equivalent to "mob rule," which they took from Madison but not at all in the way that Madison intended. But they can't say where, in fact, the power does vest if not in the people.
I think that Madison's distinction was essentially administrative, i.e., that a direct democracy ("a society consisting of a small number of citizens") would necessarily result in faction and majority passions by virtue of its construction. A representative democracy would be less prone to such flaws. But they're both democracies in the same sense -- that is, the sovereign power is vested in the people.
And of course, today we have precisely the kind of factions that Madison feared, even in our representative democracy or republic, whichever term you prefer. So, he wasn't correct in his belief that an avoidance of direct democracy was a cure.
>Objectivists (including the ones I was debating) mean that _the sovereign power does not vest in the people_ but rather somewhere else.
You read their minds? Or did you explicitly ask them if that's what they meant?
That's both from past conversations, where it's been the gist, and then in my recent conversation this is almost literally a quote (that conversation isn't available any longer on Facebook, so I can't just copy and paste): "The sovereign power vesting in the people would be mob rule. It actually vests in the representatives."
So, yes, I think they don't like "democracy" because to them the word means that "the people" (collectivism!) are in control and that would be mob rule and that would mean that individual rights would be infringed because of course the majority would want to enslave the minority.
I haven't thought all that much about it, really, but I think that might be why they seem to tend toward some kind of meritocracy -- just like in Galt's Gulch, John Galt was in control sufficient that he could say they have no rules but his rule, and therefore Dagny wasn't allowed to leave once she'd trespassed, because he said so. Maybe if they were alive during the founding, they would have been in the pro-aristocracy camp.
From my interactions with Objectivists going way back, that seems to be their general opinion. Now, this person said it vests "in the representatives," whatever that means, but that's not something I've heard very often. I'm not sure I can remember a cogent explanation from an Objectivist of where power vests, if not in the people.
Perhaps an Objectivist scholar has discussed this in more detail, but if so, I don't remember reading it. So it's possible that I'm giving an impression gained over many years of interacting with "mainstream" Objectivists -- which used to be "other Objectivists" when I called myself one.
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